Publication Type: Panel PaperAbstract: The southern drama Taiping qian (Coins of Heavenly Peace), attributed to the Suzhou playwright Li Yu, is not an obvious pick for performance in the imperial court. In the final scenes of the play, the lead character—a powerful immortal—frustrates the emperor’s desire for a magic show, instead leaving the world of men for a fairyland. Despite the failed court performance at its center, Taiping qian traveled from the marketplaces of Jiangnan to the imperial capital of Beijing, where it was rewritten for Qianlong’s court. This paper will examine the ways in which this palace edition negotiates the crises of authority both within the play and without by transforming a performance of defiance into a performance of submission that restores the emperor’s dominion over on- and off-stage realms. By making the unseen seen and the unexpected expected, by resignifying the loaded politics of reclusion and withdrawal, and by remapping the circulation of money and power, the play is rendered suitable for both the emperor-spectator and the new socio-political order. At the same time, in its depiction of an emperor’s difficult and imperfect incorporation of the frontier (both western and supernatural) into the imperium, the palace edition gives voice to the particular ambitions and anxieties of the expansionist Manchu court. While much of the work on Qing palace drama has focused on the new spectacles written specifically for the imperial court, this paper brings attention to the process whereby popular late Ming cultural forms were reconstituted in the Qing political imaginary.

2. Zhao, Lu."From Disciple to Student: The Modern School System, the Press, and Qian Mu’s Approach to the New Script vs. Old Script Controversy" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies - Annual Conference, Sheraton Hotel & Towers, Chicago, Illinois, <Not Available>. 2019-09-15 <http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p949363_index.html>

Publication Type: Panel PaperAbstract: Qian Mu 錢穆 (1895–1990) made his name as a historian among his contemporaries via his innovative reevaluation of the new script and old script controversy concerning the Confucian Classics, heatedly debated since the 18th century. While modern scholars have noted Qian’s unbiased stance in contrast with his peers’ attachments to either the old or new script camp, why Qian Mu could afford such a stance has yet to be discussed. He could do so because new methods of training intellectuals drastically reshaped the relationship between transmitters and recipients of knowledge. I argue that the installation of the modern school system changed the traditional master-disciple relationship to a teacher-student one, which gave recipients more intellectual autonomy instead of demanding conformity with a single master’s teaching. Modern publications, especially journals, further decreased transmitters’ monopolies as well as Beijing’s geographical hegemony on knowledge. As a scholar without a dominant family tradition, educated outside of Beijing’s masters’ circles, these forces shaped Qian’s career. Journals such as Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌 (Eastern Miscellany) and Xin qingnian 新青年 (New Youth), and textbooks such as Zhongguo lishi jiaokeshu 中國歷史教科書 (A Textbook of Chinese History) connected Qian to the center of academia and its concerns without binding him to its doctrines. He owes his new approach to the old script vs. new script controversy to the integration of the modern publishing and educational systems. This system produced a generation of scholars with equal intellectual autonomy.